“When the landlady of the boarding house in St. Louis died of cholera I moved to Paduca, Kantuca [Paducah, Kentucky] to find work to make enough money to go to Salt Lake City.” – Ebenezer Bryce
Figure 1 Port of New Orleans, 1841 engraving. | Photographers, A, Mondelli and William J. Bennett. - Public domain
Continued from Ebenezer Bryce: Part 1
One of the many histories written about Ebenezer claims that he was a stowaway for the long ocean voyage from Scotland to the United States, the evidence being that his name is not on the passenger list. But would a person whom acquaintances, friends, and family members later laud for his righteousness travel without paying?
I believe that a skilled, strong young man who had ample ship carpentry experience simply got a job onboard as a way to make the trip. He wrote as much, claiming that he joined the thirty-fifth “company” of converts in the UK, called the John Sharp Company after its leader, and boarded a ship to serve in its crew, though I cannot find any historical evidence to confirm or deny such a claim.
The HMS Erin’s Queen left Tullibody, Scotland, and landed in Liverpool, England, where it stayed two days to wait for a good tide. On September 7, 1848, the ship set sail with 248 passengers, 232 of whom were Mormon converts and missionaries returning home, travelling second class. For seven weeks and two days, the ship crossed the Atlantic Ocean, meeting wind, rain, and waves. Perhaps in some ways it was a blessing that the provisions on board were subpar, given that likely many passengers were seasick due to the storminess of the voyage.
The ship docked in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 28, 1848, and the 232 converts disembarked. Can you imagine what Ebenezer might have felt, having left behind the cold and constant precipitation of Scotland to find himself in a semi-tropical climate on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico? Whatever his feelings, he didn’t report them.
The John Sharp Company kept going, boarding a river steamboat and continuing up the Mississippi River to winter in St. Louis. Ebenezer stayed behind long enough to earn the $2.50 required for the steamboat ticket and some extra to pay for housing once he landed, then followed them 700 miles north to work as a carpenter and wainwright. Soon after his arrival, however, a terrible cholera epidemic broke out, killing an estimated 10 percent of the city’s population in the spring and summer of 1849. When the landlady of the boarding house in which he was living died from the bacterial disease, Ebenezer decided it was time to move on.
He was one of many LDS converts to make the arduous journey west in stops and starts. For years, LDS Church members had been moving in that direction, often driven from their various settlements by persecution from non-LDS locals, from Fayette, New York, to Kirtland and Hiram, Ohio, to Far West, Missouri, to Nauvoo, Illinois, where Prophet Joseph Smith had been the mayor. Smith’s practice of polygamy, among other LDS practices, had incited not just people from outside the church but his fellow practitioners, some of whom used the media to air their grievances. In response, he called out a militia, which didn’t win him any favors from the Illinois authorities. He was arrested and incarcerated in nearby Carthage, where an angry mob found him and his brother Hyrum. A few years before my ancestor stepped on American soil, on June 27, 1844, the mob murdered the two men, what many consider an assassination because of its religious and political implications—Joseph Smith had just announced his bid for the United States presidency.
In 1846, Brigham Young took over the LDS Church, with the goal of establishing a theodemocratic state called Deseret on a swath of land twice the size of Texas between the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the west and the Rockies to the east, the Mexican-American border to the south and up into southern California and Oregon Territory. The Salt Lake Valley was located in Mexico territory but, after the Mexican-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, the entire southwest became U.S. territory.
With that, Brigham Young began to call on prominent LDS leaders to lead groups of families to establish strategically located settlements though out the proposed state of Deseret. To name a few: San Bernardino and Port San Pedro in California; The Meadows (later renamed Las Vegas) and Truckee Meadows (later renamed Reno) in Nevada; Boise, Idaho; and Snowflake (settled by Erastus Snow and William Flake), Mesa, and Gila Valley in Arizona; and St George in Utah.
It was during that time that Ebenezer joined the migration. From cholera-ridden St. Louis he ventured 175 miles southeast to Paducah, Kentucky, where he earned enough money to join up with the James Pace Company, a Mormon wagon train of one-hundred wagons, in March of 1850. The group departed from Kanesville (now Council Bluffs), Iowa, on June 11 and arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah, on September 16, three years behind the original LDS pioneers who settled the Salt Lake Valley.
To be continued . . .